It was all about girls, naturally. Girls and cars, cars and girls. Except when it was just about cars.

And while there is a tendency to overly romanticize the days when Pontiac’s GTO was special beyond belief, it would be wrong to deny that the romance actually existed as something specific to a time and place in America.

Not this America, not the snarky, uncertain nation that now occupies the same geographical space, but a different, far more credulous America that was by no means innocent, just less rapacious and more fun in a time when the longing for things not quite understood could give a young man’s life reason.

I am, of course, talking about cars and girls.

But mainly about cars in the week after gravely afflicted GM announced that its lost and wandering Pontiac division was on a one-way run out of town.

Just like that, this steel thread in the national fabric, this icon founded in 1926 on the wildly successful (they sold 128,000 of them) Series 6-27 will vanish from a nation that once transformed Great Lakes iron ore into gold.

It was a time of pure industrial muscle that would set us apart from a world that we would inspire, bomb flat and then rebuild because we had the audacity and means to do it.

Now we specialize in building bad loans.

But I can’t be the only adult recalling a last automotive hurrah colored by selective memory. And when is memory more selective than when we look back at the years when we come into full consciousness? We forget the acne and the crushed hearts and even the individual faces as the girls of those days become one girl – a blonde, naturally – and the cars morph into one car.

For a lot of guys it’s the Pontiac GTO, for Gran Turismo Omologato, which is Italian for “Oh my omologato!”

Technically, it was a Pontiac Tempest married to a big Bonneville engine. But emotionally it was beyond belief, a car to inspire Ronny and the Daytonas to affectionately sing, “Gonna save all my money and buy a GTO. … Take it out to Pomona and let ’em know.”

I didn’t know where Pomona was and had never heard of carbon footprints or MPG. And in that 1964 noblesse oblige lay the seeds of our downfall. No excuses.

The GTO carried a wasteful, roaring 289-cubic-inch V8 with a four-barrel carburetor, heavy duty springs and – more important – factory-chromed engine parts.

These days you open a hood to a plastic engine cover because the dealers don’t want you messing with their service department profit.

Back then a lot of guys messed with engines. They replaced the factory four-barrel with chromed deuces. Then they’d park the things on the beach, hoods yawning, so others guys could take in the beauty while simultaneously ogling girls and working on their squamous cell carcinoma.

The car had simulated air scoops, too, and a built-in tachometer. And I don’t know why nobody ever mentions the front bucket seats. Back then you only saw those in European machines driven in road rallies by cap-wearing jazz guys.

The GTO had the cushy U.S. version of bucket seats and an honest-to-God floor shifter hooked to a three-speed transmission that was in turn coupled to a dragon. Or so my best friend’s older brother told us.

Here’s how jaded I have become. The other morning I pulled up beside a Ferrari, a real beauty costing some obscene hundreds of thousands. I glanced at the thing and then looked away because I didn’t want to give its driver the admiration he so dearly paid for.

Still, futuristic as the throaty beast was, it could not rival the pure lust that filled me the first time I sat in that GTO sucking in the Valhalla smell of leather and plastic. The smell, by God, of an American century speeding toward disaster.

Only we didn’t know that in the year of the Beatles and Cassius Clay, in a time just before the pill changed everything, in a time when a boy could still look at a car and feel limitless promise in upholstery and joy in shining accessories that offered far more than the sum of its heavy metal parts.

The GTO was a transporter, a punched E-ticket to all the delights promised men and the few boys who could afford it.

I’m talking about girls again. Specifically, that one special girl, the blond goddess-Pomona who would surely be attracted like a delicate moth to the GTO’s high-octane flame.

Somehow, this same feminine promise would later be connected by GM’s John DeLorean to his Pontiac Firebird, the car of the vet returning from the confusion of Vietnam, the car from a stable of cars that summed up muscle and might.

The car that my friend Phil and I would drive down the steaming, nighttime corridor of Florida’s four-lane turnpike, eating up the 350 miles between college and our girlfriends in a windows-down dash through the waning glory days of that now-vanished nation.

You can, of course, still see these cars, the meticulously restored darlings of the auto auction set. Only you can’t begin to see what drives seemingly normal men to spend fortunes on these antiquated machines because you can’t even begin to see them as they once were.

Nor can you understand how insane it would have sounded if all those long years ago someone could have told us that Pontiac would one day cease to exist. Same as the heavenly desire that drove us thundering south through primeval Everglades darkness to a long-vanished place that we called home.

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